Foundations for a methodology for medical KBS development

This paper presents the foundations for a methodology for the construction of medical knowledge based systems (KBS). To date, the lack of a methodology that takes into account the typical demands posed by medical environments has hindered the practical application of knowledge technology in medical settings. Our approach views the development process as comprising two activities: the construction of a knowledge level model and the subsequent translation of the model into a computational model in such a way that the connections between the computational structures and their knowledge level counterparts are maintained. The availability of these connections enables a KBS to communicate with domain experts in knowledge level terminology while it can use efficient reasoning techniques for the actual computations. To support the methodology a number of tools have been developed which are described. The approach is illustrated with a scenario in the area of treatment of acute myeloid leukemia.